<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>how we define the integrity of one world by nnozomi</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28261938">how we define the integrity of one world</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi'>nnozomi</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Shadows - Robin McKinley</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M, Gen, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 20:21:24</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,381</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28261938</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In the new Newworld, Takahiro has thoughts.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Maggie/Takahiro</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>how we define the integrity of one world</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/meretricula/gifts">meretricula</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There are two places—times—people now where I can almost completely relax. That was never true before, not since my mother died. If it sounds funny that I relax more now that the world is a mess of revolution and cobeys and magic than before, when…well, when we didn’t <em>know</em> it was that, well, it sounds funny to me too, but it’s true.</p><p>One is when I’m with Maggie, especially when we’re alone. That almost goes without saying. It’s always been a little bit true—ever since that first origami crane she made for me, when I kept myself from shifting for going on a week just by taking it out of its box to hold it—but it’s so much more so now.</p><p>I know <em>when we’re alone</em> can mean quite a few things. Yes, it does, that’s all I’m going to say about it…except…well. Poor Val.</p><p>Val is the other person I can relax around. He’s gone on being my mentor “until we find a were who can help you,” he says, but we work well together, and his physwiz tutoring sessions tend to slide into shifting guidance sessions and back, which helps me stay calm about it. It’s not the same as it was with my mom—how could it be? But it helps.</p><p>He’s also started teaching me and Maggie and Jill some Orzaskani on the side. He got me to admit one day how much I miss speaking Japanese—my father would never speak it with me, even though he could, because he wanted me to learn English, and there were never a lot of other Farworlders around here to begin with. I started to worry that I was going to forget it—that I’d only be able to remember my mom in English, which would make all my memories look different. We’re still looking for another native speaker, but Val got me started tutoring Maggie and Jill and even Laura—“if they are going to speak it, they may as well do so properly and not in fragments—“ and then one day we got him to admit, in passing and trying not to sound too serious, “I also sometimes worry that I may forget my native tongue…”. So, Orzaskani classes. Mostly it’s just the three of us, but Maggie’s mom sits in sometimes when she can make the time. All of this studying is generally shoehorned into little cracks and gaps around all the other work we’re all doing, which means sometimes having a Japanese lesson at one in the morning because we’re all too bruise-sore and shivery-high on adrenaline to go to sleep yet, or an Orzaskani class in the fifteen minutes before the Horde arrives.</p><p>The Horde is the kids—pretty much everyone here from our age on down, which amounts to a lot of people, and more almost every week. One thing I didn’t expect was that we would be running a school alongside a revolutionary magic initiative. The thing is that the principal—Ms. Dunstable—Joanna, she’s a friend of Maggie’s mother and she says we might as well call her Joanna now, but I can’t get used to it—she said that even for Maggie and Jill and me, almost done with high school, cutting off our education now would be a big handicap later on no matter how it all ends up, and that for kids like Ran and Jill’s little brothers it would be out of the question. So, school.</p><p>Val teaches, of course—Ms. Dunstable, I mean Joanna, said he didn’t have to, he had so much on his hands already, but he loves teaching. Even so, he really doesn’t have time to handle <em>all</em> the math and science and physwiz for <em>all</em> the kids here. So he enlisted me to help with the younger ones. Me and Jeremy.</p><p>It would be an understatement to say I was surprised to find Jeremy here, with his father and his older sister. “I kind of knew,” he said, about the magic, about his family being one of the magical ones too. “That’s why I got so into physwiz and science first. I wanted to know what the story was, get behind how it works. Then I just got interested.”</p><p>I was relieved. Friends—I don’t want to rely on Maggie for everything, it’s not fair to her. I would trust Jill with my life, any day—she practically did save my life, back when she got everyone treating me like a normal classmate before I could even speak much English--but she’s Maggie’s best friend, not mine. She and Maggie both hoped that Casimir and I would get to be friends the way they are, I think, and we’re cordial, certainly, we work together pretty well, but—I don’t know. His worldview is so different. For him, magic is just a good thing, no question, the way physics is. It can be used for ill ends, it can cause the government to oppress you, but it’s if anything a force for good. For me—it’s not that I’m ashamed of being ‘shifter. It comes from my mom and she was proud of it and so am I. It’s who I am. But it’s also…even if you forget about what happened to Val in his home country, what happened to him and Arnie here and the much worse things that have been done to people here since, all on account of magic…I used to imagine how my family would be if we hadn’t been ‘shifters. Long ago when I was very small and wanted a father like everyone else had, and then afterward, when my mom died. That isn’t going away. It’s part of who I am too.</p><p>(My father isn’t here with us. I still don’t know where he is, or if he went away when he did because he had some idea what was going to happen, or if it was just another of his endless business trips. I don’t know if he’s all right. I don’t know if he knows I am. I don’t know if I want him to know.)</p><p>I told Jeremy about being ‘shifter. I was so nervous when I did it I almost thought I’d shift right there, and wouldn’t that have been a learning experience for him, but he didn’t run away on the spot. He looked a little shocked—Jeremy has a face that doesn’t look more than “a little” anything no matter what he’s actually thinking—and then he started asking me a lot of clinical questions, mostly ones I didn’t want to answer or couldn’t, because that’s not what it’s <em>like</em> for me. It goes deep and far back. I said “Ask Val. Talk to Val. He’s my mentor for now.”</p><p>Jeremy is really frightened of Val. Maybe not <em>frightened</em> exactly, but wary of him—because if you have magic, Val feels like…how to say…like a blast furnace. You’re glad for the heat in winter, and it creates amazing things, but it’s overwhelming, and it can be deadly.</p><p>So he didn’t ask Val. I don’t know if he talked to anyone else, and I thought maybe that would be the end of it all and Jeremy wouldn’t talk to me again. But he was there the next morning, arguing with me about whether to give Keren and Josue separate assignments or make them go over triangles with everyone else again, and things have been pretty good since then.</p><p>I’m not sure if Jeremy would feel more at ease with Val or even less, if I told him about The Talk. It actually came up almost naturally, talking about ‘shifting. I know more now about how to control it—in and out—but it’s, let’s say a work in progress. “At moments of high emotion—“ Val said, and then he actually <em>blushed</em>. It wasn’t very visible in contrast to his shirt, which was the kind of red plaid that most people only use in car blankets (even the end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it hasn’t gotten Val to wear better shirts, although Maggie minds them a lot more than I do), but if you looked at his ears you could see it.</p><p>I didn’t get it, and then I did, and I blushed a lot harder.</p><p>“I think we need only talk of this once,” Val said, doing a pretty good job of pretending that neither of us was blushing at all. “Better to have it said and forget it until needed than…er…”</p><p>“Learn the hard way,” I finished, because I could just about imagine what he meant, and—<em>no</em>. Knowing that he was right didn’t stop my face from feeling like a high kelvin number, though. Without really thinking about it, I did what I’ve always done when I was embarrassed or ashamed or… I got a few sheets of origami paper out of my backpack and started folding. (For a while Maggie and I were getting by with looseleaf, but lately Arnie has started coming up with pretty decent—for Newworld—origami paper for us. He says he has connections and it’s a munition of war.)</p><p>Val knows me pretty well by this time. He let me fold away while he talked, and there really wasn’t so much to it. Mostly it took time because he had to kind of dance around his point, which was along the lines of “you might ‘shift due to high emotions during or related to sex, but as long as it’s Maggie you’re sleeping with you should be able to stay human without worrying about it,” without actually talking about his stepdaughter’s sex life (probably he doesn’t want to think about it any more than Maggie wants to think about his). I mostly nodded and said “I understand” and “I’ll be careful” and kept folding.</p><p>We both pretty much sighed with relief and agreed silently never to Talk about this again once Val finished doing his thing. His ears were more or less back to normal at that point (I’m not sure about my face), but he was still pretty quick to change the subject, leaning over to look at what I’d just finished folding. He gave me a question-mark look.</p><p>Okay, it was not very easy to see, especially because the paper I’d chosen had a kind of swirly gray-on-gray-on-gray pattern that made some extra dimensions where I hadn’t put any in. I found the right sharp points to pull on, giving it the final shape it wanted to be.</p><p>Val frowned. “That is Hix,” he said. “Or…not Hix, but…”</p><p>“I think it’s…um, Hix’s cousin from Japan? I was thinking about what the Japanese <em>gruuaa</em> might be like. I think there is a name for them, but I don’t know it.” That’s another reason I wish another Farworlder would turn up here, one who knows these things. I don’t think my mother’s family specialized in shadows, or maybe no one wanted to tell a half-Newworlder ten-year-old about them.</p><p>There is so much I don’t know. I’m something that is not exactly Newworld, not exactly Farworld, and there is so little precedent. Maggie’s aunt Gwenda says, and Val agrees, that dealing with the army here is just the prologue. There has been a three-generation gap in magic and all the things that go with it, with what survived Genecor and the army hidden away—like Maggie’s mother’s family, like Arnie and Jeremy’s sister and so many others here. Not all of them knew about it themselves. Gwenda says that inevitably too much has been lost, that the structure of magic here has to be rebuilt from the ground up.</p><p>Val says—and Casimir, and almost anyone else here who’s ever had anything to do with physwiz—that rebuilding the magic here is itself just a start, that we need to discover in this generation what cohesion is and what happens when it breaks, what silverbugs and cobeys actually are and how to deal with them better than the army does.</p><p>I grew up calling cobeys <em>yabure</em> or <em>zure</em>—different parts of Japan have different words for them, my mother’s family was from the south but we lived in Azuma. I had to look up the formal name for cohesion breaks later on, <em>gyoshu furyo</em>, which Jill says might as well be deliberately designed to prevent foreigners from pronouncing it right. Slang words and government words, but nothing older, nothing that goes back to where the breaks started. I don’t know if anyone in Japan ever tried to do what I spent last summer doing, trying to fold a cobey—the thing that’s been in my head for so long. Last summer it turned into the <em>kami</em>—the shadow-thing—I gave Maggie, and that was definitely what it needed to be then, but I still haven’t gotten rid of that idea.</p><p>I don’t know <em>enough</em>. There are a lot of people we’re learning from, but they only know what has happened so far, not what’s coming. Maggie and I between us are the open contact, the place where the electricity goes live, but not the generator, not the source. No one knows enough about that.</p><p>Maggie got her own version of the Talk from Gwenda, who was apparently a lot less embarrassed about it than Val. She said that magic and sex can work together, deliberately or otherwise, to make things that are new, and she didn’t just mean getting pregnant. That’s…a lot. Origami with bodies, Maggie said, her breath warm against my neck, and we both started snickering at just the wrong moment, but she was right.</p><p>Sometimes I forget about all of it, magic, the Horde, my father, Val, cobeys, the army, Maggie’s critters, Japan—when our hands and mouths are full of each other, everything touching, the shadows’ sweet scent clinging to Maggie and filling my head, Maggie looking at me and seeing a ‘shifter, and a hero, and her gizmohead weirdo friend.</p><p>Casimir says there are no coincidences. Maggie and me—origami and physwiz and ‘shifting and magic—between us we’re something new, we’re what might solve the cohesion question that no one ever has yet. Defining the integrity of the worlds.</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>